Functional Roundup for July 15, 2016
by Maureen Elsberry
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- July 15, 2016
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- news• scala• akka• doobie• finch• finagle• functional roundup
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- 4 minutes to read.

Scala Center launches improved SIP process
The Scala Center held its first Advisory Board meeting at the 2016 Scala Days NYC in May of this year. The purpose of the meeting was to review potential places for the Scala Center to focus their time and resources on.
The first order of business, based on a unanimous vote, is clarifying the governance of the SIP process. The evolution of the language depends on maintaining an open, community-driven process and outlining how that will look is a prime initiative.
The Center has hired Jorge Vicente Cantero as a SIP process lead who will be responsible for enforcing and shaping the SIP guidelines “in the broader interest of all Scala users/contributors”.
The first SIP Meeting took place on July 13th with a discussion about the new process. You can watch the video below:
Read the full post by Heather Miller here: A Reformed Scala Improvement Process.
doobie 0.2.4 and 0.3.0 released
Rob Norris highlights the following changes for 0.2.4:
- 293 You can now construct a
HikariTransactor
from an existingHikariDataSource
(from Raul Raja). - 294 There is now a
.nel
accumulator for non-empty resultsets (from refried). - 296 Arrays of
UUID
s are now supporte for PostgreSQL (from Veegee). - Published jarflies now have OSGi headers.
The release also includes some internal cleanup and an upgrade to scalaz-stream 0.8.0.
0.3.0 brings doobie up-to-date with major dependencies thanks mostly to the work of Jisoo Park. Doobie is now updated to scalaz 7.2, shapeless 2.3, JDK 1.8, and build support for Scala 2.12 was added.
You can view the full list of changes here: doobie 0.2.4 and 0.3.0
Bonus: Stay tuned because Scala Exercises will soon have an exercise track for the Doobie library, along with a new logo!
Right-biased Either #5135 merged to Scala 2.12
Adding Right-biased Either has been open since April 27th, but Stefan Zeiger merged two commits from Soc into milestone 2.12.0-RC1 this week.
- Defines some utility methods to make error reporting with Either easier.
Find out more about this merge here: Right-bias Either #5135
Finch 0.11-M1 released
Vladimir Kostyukov expressed that this release is the first step towards more type safety within the library. Some of the bug fixes, changes, and additions include:
- 541 A content-type is now a type-level string and does affect an implicit resolution of encoders.
- 610 charsets are now propagated to the encoder and is now
java.nio.charset.Charset
, notString
. - 606 there are two new endpoints.
Endpoint.empty[A]
that never matches androot: Endpoint[Request]
that extracts an entire HTTP requests. - Better Cats integration (since birds play so well with cats) including an
Alternative
instance forEndpoint
provided out of the box 551 and a new endpointparamsNel
returns Cat’sNonEmptyList
582.
24 contributors participated in this release which also included updated dependencies for Finagle 6.35, Circe 0.5.0-M2, Cats 0.6, and Shapeless 2.3.
You can see the full explanation of changes here: Finch 0.11-M1
Finagle 6.36 released
Kostyukov was on a roll this week, also announcing the latest Finagle release with beta Netty 4 support for HTTP/1.1 and Mux/ThriftMux, and SOCKS5.
One of the main focuses of the 6.3.6 was lowering technical debt including:
- Replacing their own version of
NoStacktrace
with the Scala version. - Replacing their own fork of SR166e with the JDK8 version.
- Cleaned up duplicated stats:
closechans
,closed
,load
. - finagle-zipkin is now spilt into two packages: finagle-zipkin (implementation) and finagle-zipkin-core (core data types and interfaces).
They also highlight a runtime change of the behavior of .onSuccess
/ .onFailure
combinators so they’re not failing a request if the passed function throws an exception.
You can read more about this release here: Finagle 6.36 release ___
Suggested information to digest this weekend:
The functional programming community has no shortage of excellent conferences and talks. Here are just a few that were recently released that we recommend checking out if you missed them the first time:
Daniel Ortiz Esquivel:
- Distributed and Reactive Data Management
- Gibraltar Meetup
View the talk here:
Amy O’Leary:
- Actor Based Concurrency
- Micro Manchester
Amy O’Leary presents a “whistle-stop tour” of Akka during the Micro Manchester microservices conference.
Find the slides here:
Upcoming Events:
- July 16th
- Hydrogen Group - London, UK
- August 5th - 6th
- Concordia University - Montreal, Quebec
- September 10-14th
- The Rheged Centre - Cumbria, UK
Have a news tip for us? Tweet to us @47deg or send to us via email here.